This project was my first, back in 2005. It originally started as a gateway for Scout groups to be able to find out more information about Hamlet Wood, give better access to booking forms and to generally allow more access to information about Hamlet Wood to people all over the country. Over the years it has had a major redesign, with better coding standards that were W3C compliant.
Since this project was started, I've included the use of the jQuery library and a new blog using Wordpress with a custom theme.
Some improvements soon to be integrated are, dynamic booking forms, dynamic pdf form creation and an online calendar for users to see when parts of the campsite are already booked.
I've developed a tremendous amount of my skills through this website.
I'm currently in my third year at University doing the sandwich year of my degree. I'm employed as a Junior Web Developer, mainly working with technologies such as PHP, Smarty and Javascript. I work in a small team of 5 people, within a larger Web Team of 60 or so people.
Whilst working here I've been part of many projects, creating new processes and keeping our sites up to date, bug free and as accessible as possible whilst keeping conversion as high as possible.
Working at Holiday Extras has allowed me to increase my knowledge of web technologies, including improving my coding techniques to follow coding standards.
Holiday Extras are the market leaders for airport parking, airport hotels and lounges. Over 4,000,000 customers booked with them last year, of which 80% used their website.
- The winner Best Holiday Add Ons & Best Travel Trade Website 2008
- The winner of the Innovation in Technology Award 2007
One of the biggest projects I've worked on at Holiday Extras was a complete revamp of our search and payment process. During this project I had a lot of responsibility for the payment pages of all of our products, this included parking, hotels and lounges.
During this re-design we integrated a bit of fun and feedback to the customer as part of the validation on the payment pages. As you filled in different parts of the payment page, we would show them they had completed a section by showing them information to do with what they had filled in. For example, once the customer had filled in their contact details, we would show them an image of a person, a woman or man depending on whether they had selected Mr, Mrs etc.
We also showed them a picture of their car with their registration number, depending on what results came back from the DVLA, we'd change the colour of the car to what it came back as from the DVLA. All of this was tied into the Javascript validation of the payment form using jQuery Validate library.
During working with Holiday Extras, we look after other brands as well. One of these is one of the most reputable brands for Airport Parking, BCP. BCP is one of the leading airport parking and airport hotel with parking providers in the UK. The BCP brand was established in 1978 and each year BCP now parks over 1 million cars.
In my second year at University, we had to create a Flash photo gallery. Mine was based on a local artist, Giles Whitehead. My Flash portfolio is based on XML files, where it pulls in the XML file, with all the information about all the photo's and captions to go with the photo's. This was so that it kept the initial load time down when viewing the portfolio but also so that anyone without any flash knowledge could go in and change the XML file details and so change what appears in the portfolio.
This portfolio was constructed using ActionScript 2, with XML integration.
The newest addition to the Hamlet Wood site was added in March 2009, with improvements being made weekly, with feedback coming in about how to make the blog better. This was added mainly to allow updates to building work by the crew at Hamlet Wood. This will evolve into a feedback centre for users of the website, and a comment system for people who would like to leave a comment about their stay with Hamlet Wood
This is a Wordpress blog, with a custom theme.
